WARDEN'S BARKSKIN - Mechanics & Interactions, How good is it? | Path of Exile: Settlers of Kalguur

"GARFSKIN! YOU'RE EATING US OUT OF HOUSE AND HOME!" - Jon, circa 2014

I am so glad you are doing silly intros. LET'S GO.

This is seems somewhat not worth it for 2 points. But given that you don’t really have access to defensive options in your kit other than freeze you

when i first looked at it i took the old values and decided its bad but this with 10% reservation is really good. actually ascendancy point starved on warden

I would have loved if the spell part also worked with spell dodge somehow. I played a super tanky character this league with capped spell dodge and evade and i could survive basically everything. I loved barkskin, but since i will combine it with spell dodge i will be able to pick 3 offensive talents, prob lighting, fire and avatar.

i feel like you want 0 stacks all the time, the mitigation at 10 stacks is pretty minimal and the variance makes it a pretty unreliable defensive layer

new barkskin is gonna feel great to lvl with for sure.

I think it's ok, but i don't get why it has a reservation. It feels like an ok defensive layer that you need to spend your points on and then you need to reserve too.

Should inquisitor's need to reserve pious path? Then for 4 points, you get more, but that's half your points.

10% is really low, but still ... Feels weird. I think it should have given 200 armor per bark. Then you could scale increase defenses, flask, and some other things to make it significant.

I'll probably still take it, but it feels weird to even need a reservation

The problem with borkskin is that you very rarely want the flat damage reduction, because the stuff you're afraid of comes in the form of huge hits.

A 4K HP character isn't going to be dying to 10 hits of 400. They're going to die to a crit, or to 4 hits of 1000, and so on. And against the big, scary, fatal damage, barkskin just goes out to lunch.

Basically, it feels like an insurance policy that insures you when you DON'T need it, and leaves you entirely exposed when you DO.

Couple that with the fact that the opportunity cost of taking barkskin ascendancy notables is NOT taking the wildly spectacular elemental damage notables, and that seems like a recipe for utter disaster.

yeah, I have a melee raider using snowblind grace, fortify, kaoms belt (which I believe is bugged based on personal testing), and I would use the first barkskin node. second seems like a waste
(probably gonna reroll pf tho tbh)

Hi, can you remind about other affliction skills which are now in unique rings? penance mark etc

my first tought was more like barkskin / persistance / cloak of flame / 90%fire res/ 3-4+ endurance charges / the formless flame / 10k+ armour. (maybe tempered by war too if only your fire res is that high) vs a mid/big phys hit you would split alot of the damage making the armour you have way better at the end you remove 400flat phys and even another 200 vs fire and since the 40%of the hit is fire vs your 90%res and endurance charges the -200 flat will be alot, vs a mid hit it will prolly put it down to zero in alot of chases and if u want to (assuming u play mostly evasion based and ur ranged or somehting) its prolly good to take the other -150flat ele + spell supression but im not sure if that even works if the base hit is just phys and u convert that damage to fire spell supp dosnt even do anything right ? so not sure if its worth, also that would be 4 points.

dogshit skin. glad is getting lucky block, chiftin got 90% all res for almost no investment, inq has free conc ground and double regen, necro has bone amour and trickster has escape artist while your boy is getting -300 phy for 10% mana reservation is this a joke?? good thing his offensive abilities are fairly op

Barkskin + Aspect of The Crab + Daresso's Defiance

Incredibly informative video. Looking into getting crab stacks alongside spider aspect

Barkskin (flat physical attack hit reduction) with Flesh and Stone (less percentage nearby damage reduction) looks pretty good.

Kintsugi anyone?

Most downplay this skill because its conditinal or lets say not static so the fraun upon this just for the sake of it.
I hope there will be some build that makes decent damage and is nicely scalable.
Nice to see someone giving it some love.

GARF

having a 10% reservation alongside having to use an ascendancy point to get it that’s a hard bass no thanks anytime they can take away movement speed or make Mana costs worse. They sure as hell aren’t afraid to do it.

I have a feeling that if you wsnt to use this defensively, going to 0 stacks and trying to stay there is the way to go. As powerful as evasion is, if you can spell supress cap and get it to 73-76% damage prevention, that is roughly the equivalent of 10 endurance charges ( by going from 50 % to 25% damage taken) against ele damage.

To bad it's 'if you haven't been hit by an enemy attack recently' if it stated 'if you haven't been hit recently' you could abuse scold's bridle

Blocking counts as being hit btw.. not sure if you mentioned this. You take no damage but it counts as being hit

Ush, sitting there in act 3 and taking on barkskin, you are pretty much unkillable at max barkskin -300 phys taken. That is a ton. At that point then you have maybe 1000 life. So just think of negating hits that can take 1/3 of life. Crazy!

What about singer whis ward loop mechanic ?)

The warden was the worst wildwood ascendency because it had draw backs for every upside. Sure it was net positive, but not with the opportunity cost. It’s looking like it’ll be the same now.

If the node said 20% more chance to evade, that’d be a reasonable ascendency. But 10% mana reservation and only getting the evasion sometimes? No thank you.

Same thing with tinctures. Losing a second flask slot and doubling the mana burn? What other ascendency has downsides like that?

Hmmm, hopefully having 0 stacks isn't so good that people leave the skill off until they are about to be in danger before turning it on, or toggling it off and back on to remove stacks. Might be too annoying even if it is technically worth doing.

sounds like complete trash to me tbh 🤔😥

Base barskin that only affects attacks is very confusing, very build dependent... The spell part is a lot more straight forward. If you don't have barskin you take less damage, if you have barskin you take less damage. I mean yah it's a lot more deeper than that and you should still keep an eye on the stacks probably. But in practice it's good enough to forget about it.

i think barkskin is most underrated skill atm. prevent 20% with inveterate+mastery make 1/4 damage taken by spell, 20% more chance to Evade also crazy. you can lose bark by spell damage so easily get 0 bark every single moment.

I think why I will have their uses still is a bit on the weaker side of defenses, especially when most Rangers build tend to have low HP especially in softcore and for newer players, most of the time the Eater beam would 1shot or leave you with so little HP that any other hit will kill you, and while 2 hit in a row aren't pretty common Evasion is entropy based and the luck in the draw can make it happen (Shaper 3 balls would definitely kill you), I think GGG will revisit this nodes when this league ends, as a closing thought no one would anoint "Persistence" (in a real scenario) first of cuz is a niche defensive layer and second cuz a lot of builds have more desiderables Nodes, I think Barkskin could work in theory as an early defense until you get better gear and obsolete in Yellow Map (without thinking that those 4 points compete vs other more stronger nodes)

wow, the wording on the spell suppression part was HORRIBLE. i honestly wouldnt have known what ggg meant by that. why cant they just write "2% additional spell damage prevented per missing bark"

In other words, barkskin = 300 health against physical hits (at 10 stacks obviously)

thank you for talking through actual examples of the reductions! im a pretty new player so the order of operations for damage reduction was totally new info to me

Idk.. it seems good but 4 ascendency points while also costing 15% reservation it doesnt seem that worth it.

Does Trauma interacts with Barkskin's Phys reduction?

I'm going to directly compare it to the old Raider node which just gave +10% chance to evade when you have Onslaugbt (which was always). If you look at it this way, the old Raider node was simply better in terms of raw power, since no mana reservation even though Barkskin is mechanically cool. I wish Barkskin maybe costed a bit more mana reserved and was more powerful?

Damage shifting is also amazing with this skill. If you damage shift from physical to elemental, then it boosts PDR from armour, makes the flat physical damage reduction more relatively valuable, and allows double dipping on the flat reduction from elemental damage. EDIT: I missed that the elemental flat reduction is for spell hits only, so you don't double dip on phys to ele shifts.

As well, I'm pretty sure the way the flat ele reduction is worded, it means each element will have the flat reduction applied. If you can shift from physical to multiple types of elemental or from one element to another, then you can potentially triple or quadruple dip on the flat reduction. The new Taste of Hate and Dawnbreaker come to mind as working quite well with Barkskin.

I also wanted to give a shout out to Imbalanced Guard. It's a fantastic keystone for splashing some armour into your build, and just got an indirect buff with the newly added base types making a few thousand armour without Determination totally reasonable.

The problem with Barkskin is that its benefits are most easily understood and at first look best when you have exactly zero barkskin. More chance to evade is very good as a defense layer for an evasion based character.

Is this pendulum effect of swinging between 0 and 10 barkskin then worth it?

My gaming intuition with Poe says that if I had to invest more in making the swinging feel good, it's properly not worth it.

I must say though I am intrigued with the mentioning of Persistence and would love to try to see how far into the campaign/maps you can get with this while feeling kind of immortal,

I am planning using this skill at league start, using melee skill with fortify , basically easy campaign i believe

garf

Another amazing breakdown. Garf

One item I am keeping an eye on with regards to Barkskin is "Kintsugi"

35% less damage taken if you have not been hit recently will go great with the flat damage from Barkskin and the 100% increase evasion if you have been hit will go amazingly with the more evasion modifier.

Kintsugi also allow you to take 15% life mastery with no life on chest.

I love it. They really took a skill that was great as like a hybrid armor/evasion sort of deal, and made it mesh so nicely with the evasion/spell suppress on the right side of the tree.

Why dont you do forgotten uniques anymore

I think taking two ascendency points to get the full effect is not great when we still have to reserve mana...

i loved wildwood boneskin, i had a awesome shield too. i loved my affliction character. its too bad they get bricked after the league.

GARFSKIN!